The passing of Fidel Castro, the retired leader of Cuba, gives us Americans an occasion to ponder why he is so famous. If we were challenged to name one Latin American leader, Castro would be the first person who comes to mind. And yet, he presided over one of the smaller countries of the Western Hemisphere. When Fidel made the revolution in 1959, this Caribbean island had just 6 million inhabitants.

Americans already knew Cuba for its sugar and also as the gambling mecca and winter home of the Mafia. Castro became newsworthy practically overnight as a guerrilla leader who defeated the 40,000-man army of the dictator Fulgencio Batista with just 3,000 fighters.

No sooner did Castro consolidate power than he confiscated all the properties of American businessmen in the country. He established the first (and only) socialist republic in the Americas and forged an economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union, the chief rival of the U.S. in the Cold War.

Fidel Castro was greeted by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly in September 1960. (File Photo/The New York Times)

FILE -- Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba embrace on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly Sept. 20, 1960. Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as CubaÃs maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday, Nov. 25, 2016. He was 90. (Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

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Moreover, he got away with all these transformations in defiance of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Together, they prepared a CIA-directed invasion force of some 1,500 Cuban political exiles. In April 1961, Castro's peasant and worker militias needed just three days to defeat these invaders at the Bay of Pigs. Then, to prevent an all-out attack by the U.S., Nikita Khrushchev persuaded Castro to accept Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Missile Crisis of October 1962 resulted. It constituted the closest that the world has ever come to mutually destructive nuclear war. For these reasons alone, we might think of Fidel Castro. But there's more. Fidel inspired his loyalists to "make the revolution" at home and abroad.

They socialized agriculture, urban properties, education and health care. Everyone worked for the government, and the armed forces pitched in with hurricane relief and sugar harvests. Castro invited thousands of Latin Americans to come to Havana for ideological and guerrilla training courses. Leftist youths took up arms in many countries, hoping to emulate Castro's success. The ideologue of the revolution and Castro's close friend, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, died in 1967 attempting to make revolution in Bolivia. Thereafter, Fidel Castro became leader of the non-aligned movement despite sending thousands of Cuban troops, with Soviet support, to fight for national liberation movements in Africa.

His revolution relocated more than 1 million Cuban refugees to Miami and elsewhere in the U.S. since 1959. The first wave of exiles consisted of political opponents; more recently, the economic migrants have predominated. The U.S. assisted in the relocation with its policies favoring Cubans over all other immigrant groups. Washington's contributions ironically assisted Castro. He tightened his control at home as the U.S. encouraged his domestic opponents to leave the country.

Castro, shown speaking on Cuban television in 2007, survived even after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Cubavision/The Associated Press)

Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow generously subsidized Cuba's decrepit socialist economy. Yet Castro did not fall from power when the USSR collapsed and its subsidies disappeared. Instead, he declared an austerity program during the Special Period in Time of Peace. Castro rallied his countrymen and women to maintain the island's independence from the meddling of the Cuban exile community and from the tightening U.S. economic boycott.

Fidel inspired his loyalists to "make the revolution" at home and abroad.

Castro had a saying: "Inside the revolution, everything. Outside the revolution, nothing." It meant that supporters received a minimum of food, education and health but forfeited the right to criticize decisions of the revolutionary state. Capitalism's chief detractor endured for more than a half-century despite residing next door to the world's most powerful country. For this alone, Castro became notorious.

Jonathan C. Brown is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published four books: two focused on the history of Argentina, one on the Mexican oil industry and one on Colonial Latin America. Dr. Brown began research on the Cuban Revolution in July and August 2006, at the very time that, because of illness, Fidel Castro turned over power to his brother Raúl. Dr. Brown took four more trips to Cuba after that. Harvard University Press will publish his new book, Cuba's Revolutionary Press, in spring 2017. The book will analyze how a revolution in Cuba influenced events as far away as Moscow, Beijing, Washington, D.C., Miami and every country of Latin America.